Tag Archives: Game Mechanics

Different game play mechanisms

Is Appointment Gaming Where the Money Is?

When 36% of American households have a DVR, the age of “appointment television” – being home at an appointed hour to watch a show live – is clearly waning. Yet with recent changes to Roller Coaster Kingdom and the launch of Café World in the last week, Zynga appears to be doubling down on the “Appointment Gaming” mechanism of FarmVille.

Roller Coaster Kingdom – a sim game where you run an amusement park somewhat similar to Rollercoaster Tycoon although without the fun of building the coasters yourself – came out July 31st in beta, went through a great deal of fixes, and then on September 23rd rolled out a change to the basic game mechanic. Instead of guests coming to users’ amusement parks randomly based on park popularity, they had to “book tours,” wait for the buses to arrive, and greet them at the park or, according to the post by the developers, “If you do not meet and greet your guests in a timely fashion, they will become crabby and leave.”

Similarly, with the release of Café World just last week, you have to select dishes to serve to your restaurant patrons, prepare it and wait (anywhere from five minutes to two days) for it to be cooked. If you don’t serve it in a timely fashion, the food spoils (the 5 minute to make bacon cheeseburger lasts about 5 minutes before it goes rotten; the hour-to-make Tikka Masal Kabobs last about an hour and 15 minutes).

This is not hugely different from the game mechanic of FarmVille, where crops spoil if not harvested in time. So while it’s hard to argue with the success of FarmVille, it’s also hard to ignore the response from the users of Roller Coaster Kingdom since the game was modified:

  • “I think the whole booking a tour bus is stupid.. now you want me to plan my life around a game… I gotta be here at certain times just so i can keep playing…”
  • “I get bored waiting for the tours to get to my park because I didnt schedule them correctly. Needs to be a way of getting guests while you are waiting for tours.”
  • “Its no longer fun now that you have to book things. What made it fun was getting more people to come to the best park”

This takes the game from a more casual play, to a much more involved one. On TV, users see what is on and if nothing good is on, they go to their DVRs to find something to watch; Using Facebook is somewhat similar, where users see what their friends are up to, and then might dive into a quick game. For the most part, the social games offer that release, but with these sim games, you are forced to check in within a certain time.

In addition there doesn’t appear to be anything to do in between waiting for things. While you wait for dishes to cook, customers come in and leave in Café World; in Roller Coaster Kingdom the amusement park just sits their empty, with no one riding or walking through the park. Compare this to Zynga’s other big hit, Mafia Wars, where you may have to wait a couple minutes to get more stamina to fight, or for energy to rebuild, but you can pretty much count on being able to do something if you happen to log in every 3 or 4 hours. Even in FarmTown there are often trees to harvest or animals to collect things from while you wait for crops to grow.

If appointment TV is dying, why is Zynga putting marketing muscle behind two games that require this scheduling? Both games got placed in the Zynga toolbar atop FarmVille and Mafia Wars over the weekend, driving huge increases in traffic: Roller Coaster Kingdom jumped from 860K to 1.67 million daily active users in a day while Café World (with a healthy helping of Facebook ads) jumped from 250K daily users to over 2.7 million and into the top ten applications on Facebook in just two days.

I can only guess that when Zynga compared the monetization metrics of a more free-flow Roller Coaster Kingdom experience to those of the more scheduling-based game play of FarmVille, the users who ended up really investing time in scheduling were the ones that Zynga could better monetize. While an engaged user is in most cases easier to monetize, I think it’s equally important to ensure there is some joy there whenever the user can spare 15 minutes to go check on the game – otherwise you may only end up monetizing a small niche of users and hurt your opportunity to reach the masses.

Marketers Look to Game Achievements to Engage Users; The Social Spam Backlash

TheTwo trends hit me in the last week: 1) the desire for marketers to increase engagement through social media is leading them to explore game mechanics to incent users and 2) the quasi-backlash against “Social Spam” which ironically is being driven a great deal by the game mechanics of applications on Facebook.

Seeing Social Media as All About Branding

I attended a great brainstorming session last week held by Eli Mandelbaum’s Founders Roundtable that touched on a couple of these things. Eli gathers VCs, founders of start-ups and industry vets together for small, intimate discussions in an effort to get people to share ideas, information and network better than you would at the typical industry event.

The group noted that several organizations are trying to put the old online metrics on social media, but really it’s less about click through rates growing followers or fans and more about brand marketing which ends up driving long-term customer value. To underscore that realization, Kevin Ryan, the VP of Social Marketing at Barnes and Noble noted they moved social media from the acquisition team to the branding team just this summer.

So while monetization of social media is still elusive, driving engagement and positive brand experiences have become the goals (eventually tied back to CRM systems where you can show the positive impact on customer lifetime value). Indeed, one attendee suggested that their Facebook Fans were actually some of their most loyal customers, with a much higher than average frequency and spend rate. This is corroborated by marketing professor Puneet Manchanda, who noted a recent study in the Fall magazine of the Steven M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan that “just becoming part of the brand community seemed to casually increase the amount spent by brand community participants by about 25 percent.”

Turning to Game Mechanics to Incent Engagement

So as engagement becomes key, marketers continue to try to figure out how to incent users to talk more about their brand. While several attempt to enable customers by providing tools and information to make them feel more a part of the brand, there is a desire to help provide additional incentive to get users to post/blog/comment about the brand.

While there are notable giveaways (from Moonfruit to Pizza Hut to coupon codes for key users to share with friends), many have started to look at tactics typically found in game play to help drive progression: unlocking of levels or content, awarding of achievement badges, leaderboards and limited items to show off.

Marketers are beginning to incorporate this game mechanic in several new ways:

  • Nike+ is letting users chart their running progress, the feedback giving them incentive to alter their running patterns, or as Dennis Crowley, Co-Founder of Foursquare said during the Founders Roundtable, give you the “incentive to get out of bed in the morning and run.”
  • Dennis’ own Foursquare is focused on mobile location-based services, but provides incentive to users to try out more restaurants by unlocking achievements (become The the Mayor of a location by going there the most often), showing leader boards, and using the social connections of its customers to drive others to try out new places.
  • Honday’s new Insight actually tries to make users more efficient drivers, prompting users to “boost their Eco Score” and gain little green leaves based on acceleration and braking skills, providing multiple levels of feedback as you drive.

While providing these kind of achievement-based or feedback mechanisms can definitely boost engagement, there is also a chance of both burn-out and annoyance. From a burnout stand point, users reach a certain level and the incentives just don’t drive them any more (“I’ll never reach the leader board” or “I’ve passed all my friends and there isn’t much of a challenge any more”).

Social Spam and the Emerging Backlash

Likewise, we’ve seen a great deal of annoyance with “Social Spam” – where you are prompted by an application to brag about an achievement, about going up a level, or challenging them to a match. These are basic game mechanics to push progression in a game, but in the social space, they are used to draw the player’s friends into the game.

I believe a great deal of Zynga’s success, in addition to good gameplay, is their ability to latch on to the creative use of “Social Spam” to get users to post to their network – to give their friends rewards (or “share the wealth” to give a FarmVille example).

But when something is successful, everyone starts to follow suit: with more and more games trying to engage users, the notifications and reminders and posts from game applications are starting to When a Facebook user helps a friends farm, they get a bonus of coins, but the friend gets this notification unless the user acts fast to Undooutnumber those by friends. Some recent feedback I’ve solicited:

  • “I try never to post if I can catch it in time…it’s annoying and fills up everyone’s feeds!”
  • “I post as last resort, better to keep in game. I filter all but the few that I play, it’s really very annoying and spamy.”
  • “I hate spamming. I want an easier way to limit spamming to only my friends who play the game.”
  • @SFsourmilk: I wish #Farmville would add REAL social components (Tractor sharing, social harvesting) rather than just social spam

And while those quotes talk about Facebook game applications, the same can be said of users in Twitter: @praxisloki: “Conflicted about videogames being able to tweet my milestones and achievements. Champions Online & Uncharted 2 both opt in.”

Clearly, users are already cognizant that there are repercussions for posting too much. They are aware of the social implications of being seen by friends as “that guy that is always playing Mafia Wars” or “the person that sends me social spam all the time” – just like companies worry about their brand, users are worried about their personal brand amongst their friends. As the novelty wears off, customers will demand more control and be more judicial about what messages they will share. (Shanti Bergel did a nice piece on Social Network Fatigue which is worth a read).

This is not to say that game mechanics are not important in developing a successful incentive strategy to get users to engage their friends across social media. But the ultimate incentive for users is in the value of what is shared. Marketers and companies must first focus on quality content, products or useful data (like Nike+ stats) and only then can they achieve long-term success by wrapping them in the game mechanics to grow them virally.

Static Game Development on Facebook is Dead

Two weeks of vacation and FarmVille still keeps on ticking:

  • In the three weeks since I noted the launch of achievements, the daily active users has gone from 7.2 million to 11.7 million (a 62% increase based on Developer Analytics numbers). Former number one Facebook game, Farm Town, has stalled by only growing 3% during that period, from 5.41 to 5.56 million.
  • FarmVille also dominated Farm Town in the number of “gifts” from that accumulated while I was gone (42 vs. 14) and the number of new friends playing FarmVille nearly doubled (while I’d like to also see the Facebook Lexicon numbers showing the number of times the brands were mentioned on status and wall posts, the data hasn’t been updated since mid-June).
  • While visiting a family farm outside Jever, my son got to drive the Harvester (see right) – while in the world of Facebook, tractors and harvesters provide a brand new virtual good opportunity that power users are likely to pay for: relieving some of the grind/tedium in the game.
  • The final sign that Farmville is dominating the planet: While at a restaurant in Heidelberg, Germany I saw the waiter’s computer screen turned to Farmville on Facebook.

Zynga is showing how to truly leverage the community of players, continually introducing new features and responding to user feedback to develop new items (see Zynga Exec Spills Beans on FarmVille Success). Zynga is doing the same around Mafia Wars, with a new expansion pack to Russia launching soon: the update has revived the audience over the last three weeks (growing 30% from 4.02 million to 5.22 million), nearly catching Farm Town for the number two spot.

The days of gaining success by just putting an application or game on Facebook and milking it are dead: you need to continually engage the audience, monitor their feedback, and continually develop and tailor the game. As part of this new era of social gaming, developers now must ensure they create a platform that allows easy expansion and devote on-going resources to continually update their games. What seems different about FarmVille is the speed of change, with new features coming out nearly every week – a pace no other game to date has been able to achieve. To some extent, this is a morphing of MMORPGs and the social space. With the ability to gather feedback, develop and respond quickly to delight and retain customers, the success of social games make you question the long-term viability of the launch-and-its-done reality of console games.